At Home With Katherine Heigl

The star dishes on the Grey's Anatomy backlash and her new life at home with her adopted girls and their 36(!) pets.

Katherine Heigl lives on an idyllic ranch in Utah, about an hour's drive from Salt Lake City. And what a drive! A nearly empty highway cuts through a seemingly endless swath of pale green landscape. Only a distant mountain range obscures the wide expanse of periwinkle sky.

At the entrance to her serene and rambling property, there's just a simple metal gate  no electronic barrier or surveillance cameras like those that typically protect celebrity homes. There aren't even any people here as far as the eye can see.

A dirt road winds past horses grazing on a wide, flat plain, leading to a brand-new, state-of-the-art barn and indoor riding arena. It's a cavernous, football-field-size building with a lengthy stretch of stalls for horses plus a modern kitchen, bar and living area among other rooms. Katherine and her scrappy Chihuahua, Gertie, whose tongue pokes out of the side of her mouth comically, welcome a visitor into the star's office. In person, Katherine ("Katie" to friends and family) is lean and taller than she appears on-screen. She's makeup-free behind tortoiseshell glasses, her pale hair has been twisted into a messy bun, her jeans are worn, her leather boots are grubby and her smile is radiant.

Katherine, 35, has always loved animals and the outdoors, and these remote 25 acres are where she and husband Josh Kelley, 34, a singer/songwriter, have spent the past four years nesting with their daughters, Naleigh (a 5-year-old "princess through and through") and Adalaide ("a totally laugh-y typical 2-year-old, running around like a madwoman"). The place is also home to their eight dogs, three cats, two donkeys, two pygmy goats, 10 chickens and nine horses, plus two miniature horses. Three of the horses are trained for dressage, an equestrian sport Katherine has dabbled in for the past five years. "It's a style of riding that is like dancing," she explains. "I have a lot more to learn, but I love it.

"Josh and I are into this quiet life," she says between sips of a smoothie she's whipped up  an über-healthy mix of spinach, apple, peach, macadamia nuts, chia seeds, ginger and açai powder. "Neither of us likes the traffic and the chaos of Los Angeles. It's overwhelming."

Yet four years after relinquishing the role of medical resident Izzie Stevens on the hit drama Grey's Anatomy, Katherine is headed back to L.A.  and network TV. In NBC's new political thriller State of Affairs (debuting in November), she'll play the part of Charlie Tucker, a CIA briefer to the President who pinpoints the most menacing terrorist threats.

Besides playing a cleverly written character around whom the show is anchored, Katherine  along with her manager/mother Nancy  also has a hand in producing it. She's already exerted her power in everything from directing decisions to wardrobe changes. The spiky stilettos she wore in the pilot episode, for instance? Already on their way out.

"They were a terrible idea!" Katherine says, laughing. "By the end of my workday, they'd reshaped my feet into something else. From now on, I think Charlie's going to come to work wearing Uggs, a comfy pair of boyfriend jeans and a sweater. When she goes to the Oval Office, she can put on the nice dress and shoes!"

She may hate running in heels, but Katherine loves running the show. She's certainly never been one to keep her opinions to herself. After winning an Emmy in 2007 for her role on Grey's Anatomy, she decided not to submit her work for the 2008 race, telling the press, "I did not feel that I was given material this season that warrants an Emmy nomination." In an infamous interview with Vanity Fair that same year, she described Knocked Up  a movie that propelled her to new heights of fame  as "a little sexist." And when she went on the Late Show With David Letterman in July 2009, she complained about the long work hours on the Grey's set.

These incidents earned Katherine a reputation for being "difficult"  one that's been frustratingly hard to shake. Ever since she was a child, when her acting career was launched, she's been rolling with the punches  sometimes elegantly, sometimes not. But, fortified by this stretch of time on her ranch with her family, she's looking to move beyond all that. On the bright side, those earlier missteps have helped to inform the strong, self-aware woman she is now.

A child star grows upKatherine spent her childhood in a modest section of New Canaan, a posh Connecticut hamlet. She was the youngest of four children (including two biological brothers and an adopted sister), with a stay-at-home mom and a commuter dad. But when she was nearly 8, her family was rocked by the death of her brother Jason, 15, in a car accident. "My parents became shells of themselves," she says. "My 12-year-old sister and I were just sort of wading through everyone else's grief."

During this dismal period, their aunt created a line of hair ornaments for girls and asked if she could take photos of Katherine for the packaging. When she suggested submitting the photos to a modeling agency, Katherine's grief-distracted mother acquiesced. "And it just started rolling," Katherine says. "I booked my first movie when I was 11." By the time she was in sixth grade, Katherine was landing a movie a year and began transferring her schoolwork back and forth from her local classroom to far-flung film sets. "My mother would tell you that grief never goes away," Katherine says, but her daughter's nascent acting career got Nancy out of the house during a very dark time.

For a handful of years, Katherine was just another pretty girl, a self-described late bloomer. "I prayed and prayed for big boobs," she says, laughing. "To this day, my mother jokes, 'Oh my gosh, it really worked!' " At 14, she blossomed into the hourglass-shaped scene-stealer in the film My Father the Hero, alongside Gérard Depardieu.

Katherine's classmates didn't share her joy about her new, curvy figure and her growing acclaim. "As soon as I started coming into my own and getting a little self-confidence, my closest girlfriends turned on me," she says. "I didn't know what I was doing wrong. So I became a people pleaser, always trying to get people to like me."

Late in her sophomore year, she decided to stop trying so hard. "I went off to do Under Siege 2, and I was gone for six months," she says. "When I came back, I made the decision that I wasn't going to keep pandering, and that's when I formed really amazing, lifelong friendships."

After high school, Katherine relocated to Los Angeles, toting her already jam-packed acting reel. For the next several years, she managed to land only smallish movie roles and a stint on the sci-fi TV show Roswell. Then, when she was 24, Grey's Anatomy hit the mark. "It was the first time in my career that a lot of people were actually watching my work," she recalls. She began to regain the confidence she'd lost in the years when success had seemed out of reach. "I started to come back into my own again," she says, shaking her head. "And I started to get a little mouthy.

"It felt very similar to the year I went through in eighth grade," she says thoughtfully. "I began having very strong opinions about some things and felt like I had a right to voice them. Maybe I spoke a little bit too much without thinking. But I was young, and I was just kind of blooming again."

Not long afterward, that word "difficult" started showing up in Katherine's press clippings. She worried that the label would hinder her opportunities in the future. Despite the "wonderful work experiences" she's had on movies like 27 Dresses and Life as We Know It, she's felt a constant need to prove herself. "In any business or professional situation, I had to go above and beyond to prove that whatever the press was saying about me was not the truth," she says.

Living in Los Angeles  that pressure cooker of image-conscious film and TV types  only exacerbated her anxiety. In the wake of media slights, she says, "I get nervous; I get worried. I don't want to put too much of myself out there, because it tends to just open the doors to criticism and judgment."

These fears  still palpable as she prepares to head back into the Hollywood fray  no longer overwhelm her, thanks in part to her husband's steadying influence. "What are you so afraid of?" he asked her one morning a few months ago. "Why don't you just commit to being you, and to hell with the rest of it?" Josh loves the woman he married: a vibrant go-getter who speaks her mind and calls 'em like she sees 'em. From his perspective, for his wife to stifle that impulse is to betray her very self.

"I'm sure Josh has said it to me in different ways at different times," she says. "But it was the way he said it to me on that day. There was a little bit of grace, and I heard it. I understood it emotionally, not just intellectually. And it helped me so much. I'm a decent person doing the best I can. I would never intentionally be rude or disrespectful to anybody  but if I am, then it's my responsibility to make the situation right. And I've gotten pretty good at apologies, because I've had to make them throughout my life!"

Family comes firstKatherine has been benefiting from her man's wisdom and support since the day they met in 2005. She was hired to act in a music video for Josh, an amiable southerner from Georgia who's had several hits on the adult contemporary and country music charts. (His younger brother, Charles, is a member of the country group Lady Antebellum.)

"Someone said he was single," says Katherine. "And I thought, This could be really fun!" But when she was introduced to him, he showed only a passing interest in her. "He was all busy running things," she says. "So I spent the whole day flirting with the assistant director on set."

But Katherine and Josh both attended a group dinner after the shoot, and apparently Cupid showed up, too. The pair talked most of the night. "And that was that," she says. "We've been together ever since." They married in 2007, when she was 29. "We had the wedding up here in Deer Valley, two days before Christmas," she says of the ceremony, with several of her Grey's cast mates in attendance. "It was Narnia, a winter wonderland. It was magic." Soon thereafter, they settled into their L.A. home together.

Josh shares his wife's love of family, and he seconded her desire to start one soon after they were married. Her fond memories of growing up with a South Korean big sister made adoption from that country her first choice. "My family had its own unique look," she says. "And I wanted the one I began with my husband to have the same look, in a way." In this decision, too, Josh supported her.

So despite their hectic work schedules (Josh's touring, Katherine's year-round filming), the two entered into the unpredictable foreign-adoption process. Their South Korean baby, whom they named Naleigh, arrived in 2009, earlier than expected  and just as Katherine was diving into three months of long workdays on a movie shoot in Atlanta. "I would come home angry and frustrated that I'd missed everything with my kid that day," she says. "I didn't get to wake her up from her nap, or do bath time or bedtime. I'd have to sneak into her room and kiss her when she was sleeping, hoping not to wake her up.

"I felt like my priorities were messed up," she says of that period. "I was putting so much time and energy into just my work, but I was raised [to believe] that family comes first." That epiphany has factored into every decision she's made since. Shortly after returning to Grey's, she took a family leave and spent a couple of "glorious" months at home, caring for her daughter. It confirmed her growing sense that she'd have to cut ties with the show, and soon afterward, in 2010, she did.

"We had big dreams of expanding our family, moving to the mountains and having a quieter life," she says. "Utah is spectacularly beautiful, the people are wonderful and kind, it's an easy commute from L.A.  and there's no traffic!"

It also happens to be a state where 60% of the residents are Mormon  the religion of Katherine's childhood. Although she no longer practices, she credits her family's faith with providing a strong foundation for her: "That structure and discipline was really good for me," she says. "I had a childhood that was a childhood. I listened to my parents. I respected the rules."

Katherine's deeply ingrained value system is apparent now that she's the mother of two daughters. In 2012, she and Josh adopted their second child, Adalaide, in Louisiana. By then Katherine was a full-time homemaker, only occasionally leaving the ranch for short movie shoots. Again the baby arrived earlier than expected, but this time Katherine's schedule was more flexible. "We brought her home, and right away Naleigh was like a little mommy," Katherine recalls with a laugh. "She'd say, 'No, no. You're not holding her right.' Or, 'She needs to eat again.' I'd be like, 'Would you back off? Just give me a minute!' "

Katherine recounts the months of Adalaide's infancy with a wistful fondness. "Naleigh would go off to her ballet classes and other stuff, and I would sit with the baby at home. I would read, and she would lie on my chest, and we'd lie on the couch with, like, four dogs, and watch Friday Night Lights," she says. "I found it so peaceful."

The good life, for realClearly Katherine's daughters are the center of her universe. "The girls love it on the ranch," she says. "They are really content to stand at the river and throw rocks in, and feed the chickens. Naleigh is good at feeding the horses and holding out the hay, though she won't get on [a horse]." She's more of a tutu-and-tiara kind of girl. "She loves clothes," says Katherine, shrugging. "That kind of fashion sense doesn't come naturally to me. She'll dress herself in a purple outfit, and I'll say, 'How about this purple headband?' And she'll say, 'No, that's too much purple, Mom.' "

Katherine predicts that Adalaide will love horseback riding when she gets older, "because she's far more physical and adventuresome" than her sister. But for now, she recognizes that a 1,000-pound horse might appear intimidating to her preschooler and her toddler. And she concedes that her elder daughter certainly isn't lacking in self-confidence. "She is such a little adult in a tiny body," Katherine says of Naleigh. "She's Little Miss Personality.

"And each of my daughters is a daddy's girl," Katherine continues, with mock chagrin. At bedtime, she and Josh each take a kid, switching off every night, but lately Naleigh's been asking for Daddy more often. "It's because he will rub her back and sing her made-up songs," Katherine complains, laughing. "He has an amazing imagination. He'll say, 'Pick two things.' And she'll pick, say, a unicorn and a bear. And he'll make up a song about those things. Well, I cannot compete with that!"

But Heigl will never be an overly lenient mom who treats her daughters like pals. From time spent with her niece Maddie, a Los Angeles preteen, she knows all about the feverish race to adulthood among kids that age. She prefers the slow lane for her own girls. "I was looking at Maddie's Instagram account with her the other day, to see whom she was following," Heigl says. "There was so much sexual content and she's 12! I un-followed about 15 people."

And Heigl refers to a certain clothing store that's trendy among teen girls as "Sluts in Training." It's yet another reason she prefers Utah to L.A. "Up here, the other kids are just kids," she says. "They're the children of working parents and families with ranches and cattle and horses, living normal lives, celebrating normal moments."

Since her new show, State of Affairs, films in Los Angeles, Heigl will enroll Naleigh in kindergarten there this fall. And if the show is a success, the family will have to readjust to life in L.A. But this time, Heigl's built in some safety valves: "I made the choice to do only 15 episodes a season," she says. That means the family can split the year into six months in L.A. and six months back on the ranch. She's hoping the local public school in each place will allow her to move Naleigh back and forth during the school year.

"I think it'll be all right," Heigl says. And if it's not? She'll do some more tweaking of her schedule. After all, she's a producer now. She's supposed to speak up.

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